Incident 62: Bad AI-Written Christmas Carols

Description: Janelle Shane, an AI research scientist, used 240 popular Christmas carols to train a neural network to write its own carols. This incident has been downgraded to an issue as it does not meet current ingestion criteria.

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Alleged: Janelle Shane developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Carollers.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
62
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2017-12-23
Editors
Sean McGregor

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

Janelle Shane, an AI research scientist, used 240 popular Christmas carols to train a neural network to write its own carols. The output closely mimicked a Christmas carol, but made no logical sense.

Short Description

Janelle Shane, an AI research scientist, used 240 popular Christmas carols to train a neural network to write its own carols

Severity

Unclear/unknown

Harm Distribution Basis

Age

AI System Description

Neural network designed by Janelle Shane meant to write Christmas carols.

System Developer

Janelle Shane

Sector of Deployment

Arts, entertainment and recreation

Relevant AI functions

Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

Neural network

AI Applications

language processing, language output

Named Entities

Janelle Shane

Technology Purveyor

Janelle Shane

Beginning Date

2017-12-22T08:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2017-12-22T08:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Unclear/unknown

Intent

Unclear

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

240 popular Christmas carols

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

AI Incident Database Incidents Converted to Issues

AI Incident Database Incidents Converted to Issues

github.com

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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